BilliontoOne, Menlo Park, Calif, has developed a highly accurate and cost-effective covid-19 test protocol that uses a novel technology with 30 times the throughput of conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based tests.
The BilliontoOne test uses different sets of instruments and chemicals from existing covid-19 tests, enabling labs to unlock a new set of unused capacity, which could potentially allow for more than one million additional tests per day in the United States alone. Test reagents are expected within weeks, pending manufacturing of kits and FDA emergency use authorization.
Oguzhan Atay, PhD, BilliontoOne.
“We’ve all seen the impact this pandemic has had on every aspect of our daily lives,” says Oguzhan Atay, PhD, chief executive officer of BilliontoOne. “From the loss of lives to the damage to the economy to the strain on the healthcare system, the coronavirus has delivered a crippling blow to the country. We’re honored to be on the front lines of this fight against the pandemic, and we’re certain that this unique technology will help save lives and stop the spread of the virus.”
Using the company’s patent-pending qSanger spike-in and proprietary machine-learning algorithms, BilliontoOne’s covid-19 assay takes advantage of the 30 times higher throughput Sanger sequencing capacity (1,536 samples on qSanger at a time versus 48 samples on qPCR at a time). The company’s qSanger technology enables each Sanger instrument to automatically perform 3,840 tests per day, and there are hundreds of instruments available from the Human Genome Project alone.
For more information, visit BilliontoOne.
